Using micro-measurements to track student experience
Matthew Watson and Helen Driscoll University of Sunderland
In this session we will introduce a novel way of measuring student experience using micro-measurements. Micro-measurements provide a systematic understanding of how day-to-day events affect the student experience and how it changes across the course of the academic year. The results showed that student satisfaction and stress are closely and reliably related across stages of a programme and time of year. They also showed that satisfaction improves when events that mark progress through the programme occur. This knowledge enabled responsiveness to student needs and enabled interventions to address issues as they arose. Micro-measurements provide a valuable formal and systematic addition to the current use of end of module and programme evaluations that enable us to understand student experience in a more nuanced manner.
Harnessing student engagement with UKES data: findings from the institutional project
Elena Zaitseva and Ben Stacey Liverpool John Moores University
The presentation will explore findings from the HEA’s Strategic Excellence Initiative project undertaken at Liverpool John Moores University. The project aims at better understanding of student engagement data collected by the UK Engagement Survey (UKES) and how it could be used in curriculum development and enhancement. The relationship between engagement data and other indicators of student success – such as retention performance and satisfaction will be presented. Findings from in-depth discussions with staff and students from three subject areas will also be shared - indicating that engagement data are inherently more complex than
satisfaction data and disciplinary differences as well as level of study directly influence student learning approaches and how they respond to the UKES questions. Implication of the findings for a wider institutional adoption of the survey and incorporation of its metrics into the quality assurance and enhancement processes will be discussed.
Workshop: Chalk and Cheese: Can the NSS and UKES be used together to enhance the student experience?
Nathaniel Pickering and Alan Donnelly Sheffield Hallam University
This session will explore the relationship between the UK Engagement Survey (UKES) and the National Student Survey (NSS) and demonstrate how the UKES can be used to improve student satisfaction. Analysis of undergraduates' responses to the UKES and NSS at a Post-92 Institution has shown that there is a significant relationship between levels of engagement and student satisfaction. During this interactive session we aim to show how university staff can maximise this relationship between the two surveys by using UKES not only as a way to measure student engagement but also as a reflective tool for staff about their teaching practices. This could help staff to identify key areas for development for both themselves and students; the focus on student engagement moves away from the proxy measures of the NSS while still increasing student satisfaction which is crucial to many institutions.
What Makes for Excellent Teaching? Investigating the role of students' and academics' expectations
Doug Ingram & Peter Watts University of Nottingham
A key tool for transforming teaching is student feedback. However the standard surveys often provide extensive amounts of quantitative data where the direct link to what is needed to improve teaching is not always clear. These surveys may also foster an ‘outside in’ consumer model where we prioritise providing exactly what our students want from us or at least what we perceive they want from us. In this session we will discuss our ongoing research which seeks to gain a clearer perspective on what both students and academics think makes for excellent teaching. This research involves asking: 1) what students think excellent teaching involves; 2) what students think academics think excellent teaching involves; 3) what academics think excellent teaching involves; and 4) what academics think students think excellent teaching involves.
Bias in Student Evaluations of Teaching: What’s the evidence?
Tanya Osborne University of Loughborough and Lancaster University
There have been many stories in the press recently about studies that show that student feedback is biased against female lecturers. Does the wider evidence base agree? Are there other groups who experience bias in student feedback? What can we do to minimize the impact of bias when we interpret students’ feedback? This
session looks at recent evidence in studies of student feedback and makes some practical recommendations about how to ensure that the systems are fair.
How do you make sense of 40 000+ free text comments?
Rod Cullen Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester Metropolitan University has run an Internal Student Survey bi-annually since 2011. It normally results in 9-10 000 students sharing 40 000+ comments in response to two open free text questions: “The best thing about my course/unit is:” and “Things I would most like improved on my course/unit are:”.
Such large data sets can be overwhelming. In this presentation we share two examples where we have used keyword filtering to extract and subsequently thematically analysed subsets of comments to make sense of specific aspects of students’ experience across the institution.
Example 1 examines 4000+ comments in 2011 and again in 2014 relating to student experience of assessment and feedback.
Example 2 examines 2000+ comments in 2014 and again in 2015 relating to student experiences of technology-enhanced learning (TEL).
In both cases we explore emergent themes and use of our findings to inform on-going enhancement and related staff development activities at institutional level.
